Turkey’s Syria problem

Turkey’s cooperation
with the Gulf states, reportedly establishing a secret shared command centre in
southern Turkey to coordinate rebel attacks, may be designed to contain the influence
of others and control which groups get arms. But Turkey’s recent regional
resurgence in the Middle East is at risk of drowning in the Syrian quagmire.

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The Arab spring
should have been good for Turkey. Over the past decade, Ankara has built
stronger commercial, political and cultural ties with the Arab world than at
any time since the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Turkey’s prime minister,
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is widely popular on Arab streets. Indeed, in the wake of
regime change in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen, many spoke of emulating the
‘Turkish model’ pioneered by Erdoğan’s moderately Islamist AKP party.

However, as spring
has turned to autumn, whatever hopes Ankara may have had that like-minded
democratic Islamist governments would emerge peacefully across the Arab world
have slowly been dashed. Right on Turkey’s doorstep, the ongoing conflict in Syria
shows no signs of ending soon. Yet the shape and scope of the conflict is not
entirely incidental, and Turkey’s own missteps and miscalculations have played
a major role in creating the quagmire that it has found itself being sucked
into. As things stand, the Syria crisis not only threatens Turkey’s new-found
regional influence and popularity but could also cause major problems at home.

Where previous
Turkish governments had shunned the Arab world, AKP foreign minister Ahmet
Davutoğlu’s mantra of ‘zero problems with neighbours’ saw Ankara engage with the
Middle East at the same time as it maintained close ties with the west. Syria –
its 911km border being Turkey’s longest – became the cornerstone for this
engagement. After settling their historical differences over water, territory
and Syria’s past support for Kurdish rebels, bilateral relations saw a dramatic
improvement: Turkish exports to Syria quadrupled between 2006 and 2010, visa
requirements were dropped and joint cabinet meetings were held. Erdoğan even
holidayed with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Moreover, by opening up Syria,
Turkey opened up the Arab world. Syria provided a trade route to Arab states
further south and, whether through dubbing soap operas or sharing an
anti-Israeli platform, helped to improve Turkey’s image on the Arab street.

Thus when the
Syrian uprising broke out in March 2011, Erdoğan did not call on Assad to step
down, as he had of President Mubarak in Egypt, but instead urged reform. Turkish
foreign ministry officials claim that they even drafted a speech for Assad to
deliver that outlined democratic reform. As Assad was deploying lethal force
against then-peaceful protestors, Davutoğlu made several trips to Damascus to
urge change, all the while insisting to Turkey’s western allies that his
government could be persuasive. He was wrong. By August 2011, Turkey had
realised that for all their closeness they had no real leverage and Erdoğan
joined the growing calls for Assad to resign.

Ties rapidly deteriorated.
Turkey hosted the political Syrian opposition, the largely ineffectual Syrian
National Council (SNC), introduced economic sanctions and, when the opposition
eventually took up arms, provided sanctuary for the armed opposition, the Free
Syria Army (FSA). Tensions along the now-closed border escalated, with Syria
even shooting down a Turkish jet in June, killing two. The possibility of NATO
military strikes being launched from within Turkey in order to create rebel
safe havens within Syria have been repeatedly mooted, though not approved. Erdoğan’s
holidays with Assad are now a distant memory.

Why did Turkey turn
so suddenly on Syria? Publically, officials make the moral case: they could not
stand by while Assad butchered his own people. Perhaps – but Erdoğan’s slowness
to condemn similar actions by Gaddafi in 2011 or by Iran in 2009 suggests a
willingness to deploy realpolitik when necessary. Ankara’s actions are instead
based on an array of internal, regional and global calculations. Contrary to
some suggestions, Turkey is not simply following US directions to use the Syria
crisis to push Assad’s key ally, Iran, out of the region. Erdoğan has his own
agenda, which happens to overlap in places with US interests. Primarily, Turkey
fears a protracted civil war and the collapse of Syria’s territorial integrity,
aware that it could embolden Kurdish separatists, provide a safe haven for Islamist
terrorists and lure in regional competitors.

Regionally,
there is a desire to be on the right side in the Arab spring. Turkey, which had
made no previous attempt to promote Arab democracy within its ‘zero problems’
strategy, was thrown by the events of 2011. After slow reactions to
developments in both Libya and Syria, Ankara has sought to retain its high
standing on the Arab street by replacing ‘zero problems’ with what Davutoğlu
calls a ‘values-based’ foreign policy, backing democratic forces. Related to
this is a further aim: to retain influence over Syria and the wider region
after the Assad regime falls. By backing the Syrian opposition – promoting its
allies the Muslim Brotherhood within the SNC and providing bases and support to
the FSA – Turkey hopes to win favour with whoever succeeds Assad. This process can
also work to contain the influence of other regional powers – not just of Iran,
but also of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who have boosted their own influence by
sending arms and money to the FSA and particularly to the growing Salafist
Islamist contingent within those forces. Turkey’s recent decision
to cooperate with the Gulf states on the FSA – reportedly establishing a secret
shared command centre in Adana in southern Turkey to coordinate rebel attacks –
appears partly designed to contain the influence of others and control which
groups get arms.

Erdoğan’s hubris ?

Yet Erdoğan – who,
though elected, effectively controls all foreign policy, aided by Davutoğlu –
has made several missteps and miscalculations. Firstly, Assad’s regime is
stronger than he thought. On breaking with Syria in August 2011, Ankara assumed
that Assad, like the regimes of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, would
soon collapse under popular pressure. However, despite a year and a half of
demonstrations, sanctions and armed resistance, the core of the regime remains
intact. Although many individual soldiers have switched sides, no whole units have
defected, as happened in Libya, leaving Assad with a monopoly on heavy weaponry
and air power. Although few expect him to survive indefinitely, dislodging him
may require the kind of very long, destabilising civil war that Turkey sought
to avoid.

Turkey also
overestimated the unity and power of the Syrian opposition in exile that it
backed. Rather than being seen as a government-in-waiting as was hoped, Syrian
demonstrators saw them instead as being out of touch. Indeed, by promoting
their allies the Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey helped to dissuade several key
groups from backing the SNC, including Syria’s Kurds, Christians and secular
Sunnis.

Within Turkey,
critics complain that Erdoğan’s arrogance led to these mistakes. He believed that
he and his advisors ‘understood’ Syria and its population, despite the Turkish
foreign ministry boasting surprisingly few Arabic speakers or experts on Syria.
The main opposition party, the CHP, argues that Erdoğan was wrong firstly to be
so close to Assad before 2011 but then that he went too far the other way by
cutting all ties so abruptly in August and demanding regime change, thereby removing
any remaining leverage. Several columnists complain that, for the first time
since the creation of the republic in 1923, the Turkish government is openly
calling for regime change in a neighbouring state. Moreover, Turkey is hosting,
funding and – allegedly – arming an opposition group, a practice it has long
abhorred, such as when neighbours supported militant Kurdish separatists.

Whether it was
unavoidable or partly Erdoğan’s fault, Syria’s descent into civil war now not
only threatens Turkey’s regional ambitions but could also cause instability at
home. Well over 50,000 Syrian refugees have crossed into Turkey to flee the
violence. Although this situation is containable for now, history provides
countless examples of waves of refugees – whether Palestinian, Afghani or
Congolese – sparking major strife in their new host countries. Ethnic tensions
have already been awoken. Turkey’s 500,000 Alawis – of the same sect as Bashar
al-Assad – fear that the influx of (mostly Sunni) Syrian refugees, many of whom
blame Syria’s Alawis as a whole for Assad’s butchery, could turn Turkish Sunnis
against them. Turkey’s Alevis, a larger group of 15–20 million people who share
their origins with the Alawis, have expressed similar concerns. Turkey’s strong
nationalist identity has traditionally spared it sectarian tension, yet some
fear the AKP’s Syria policy could lead down that route.

Even among
Turkey’s Sunni majority, the AKP is facing popular opposition to its increased
involvement in Syria. While most Turks oppose Assad, a poll in the Zaman newspaper in July 2012 found that
only 28 per cent supported Turkish military action against him, and barely 33
per cent agreed with Erdoğan’s current policy. This opposition is not just from
secularists, who fear an Islamist government next door if Assad falls, but exists
among many of the 50 per cent who voted for AKP in 2011. Despite holding a
commanding political position, Erdoğan must be wary of letting the Syrian
crisis erode his base, especially given his ambitions to become president in
2014.

The Anatolian Tigers and the Kurds

Two major
fallouts from Syria could prove particularly damaging to Erdoğan and his
government. Economically, much of the AKP’s popularity rests on the boom they oversaw
since 2002. Significant new AKP support comes from the manufacturing cities of
central Turkey – the so-called ‘Anatolian tigers’ – that rely on Middle Eastern
markets. Although Syrian trade was relatively modest and only a few regions,
notably Hatay, have been damaged by the border closure, there are fears the conflict
may destabilise its neighbours – notably the vital market of northern Iraq – and
so hit Turkey’s economy in the AKP heartland.

The second major
fallout is the implications for Turkey’s Kurdish problem. The Syria crisis has
exacerbated the decades-long armed struggle between the government and the PKK.
The Syrian regime has largely withdrawn from its own Kurdish territories, allowing
the PKK’s Syrian arm, the PYD, to fill the vacuum and provide their Turkish
comrades with additional support. Moreover, the Syrian regime itself is accused
of reviving its direct ties to the PKK from the 1990s as a means to punish
Turkey for backing the FSA, encouraging domestic terror attacks such as a bomb
in Gaziantep in August that killed eight. Finally, with north-eastern Syria now
effectively an autonomous Kurdish enclave, rather like northern Iraq before it,
the pressure on Turkey to permit something similar in its own eastern Kurdish
territory will only grow.

Turkey’s Syria
problem shows no sign of going away. Even if the regime is eventually toppled,
the opposition has not shown the unity needed to hold the country together, and
so it is feared that a civil war may erupt in post-Assad Syria regardless.
Turkey faces a dilemma. The longer the conflict rages, the more likely it is
that the instability it dreads will follow. Erdoğan seems reluctant to directly
intervene, however, knowing it may make matters worse, creating a power vacuum that
is likely to be filled by Turkey’s enemies. Having invested a lot of regional
and domestic capital in toppling Assad, however, he can’t really step back from
his current policy of backing the armed rebels in the hope they’ll make the
breakthrough alone. Nevertheless, his does seem to be a strategy based on hope
more than anything else. Through a combination of poor judgment and bad luck, Erdoğan
now finds himself heavily invested in Syria’s future but with little control over
how things are developing. While he and his AKP party may yet emerge in the
elevated regional position they sought as the Arab spring broke out, the Syrian
quagmire may yet undermine and submerge much that they have built in the last
decade.

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